


Steeping Time

by Amazing_E_ko



Category: Shoujo Kakumei Utena | Revolutionary Girl Utena
Genre: F/F, Minor Original Character(s), Poetry, discussion of toxic relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-17
Updated: 2014-10-21
Packaged: 2018-02-21 13:58:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,623
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2470730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Amazing_E_ko/pseuds/Amazing_E_ko
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two very different narratives intertwine. Anthy seeks Utena in the realm of dreams and myth, while Juri and Shiori deal with much more mundane, but no less difficult, conflicts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Assam

**Author's Note:**

  * For [spiralmaiden](https://archiveofourown.org/users/spiralmaiden/gifts).



> For spiralmaiden! Thank you for the excellent prompts. I hope you find something in this story to enjoy.
> 
> A general note: this story is written as two separate and contrasting narratives. One is poetry, one is prose. I am fully aware that fandom poetry is not some people's cup of tea, so the story is designed to allow you to ignore the poetry if you want to. It has no narrative bearing on the prose elements, they are completely separate. (Though there are thematic links, I hope.) I hope that whatever way you decide to read this story - prose only, poetry only, or any combination of the two - you enjoy it.
> 
> Originally this was one long work, but I wanted the differentiation of chapters. In theory, it's a better system.

**Assam**

_Upon a green hill you will find the dreamer._

_So said the shadow, speaking in the voice_

_of the dying leaves. Over river and under lake_

_through the forests of the mind and the crowds_

_of Shibuya you will seek her, and find her only_

_when all hope seems lost._

_The questant said nothing, only bowed her head._

_Beyond her unrolling the telephone wires were blue_

_with electricity, the concrete roads slabbed and vast._

_In one hand she held a rod of hazel, in the other_

_a mobile phone. Her brow was crowned_

_with amaranth and lily._

_On the banks of the Meguro the questant_

_sat, and poured tea from a flask_

_into a porcelain cup. In the ripples of the clear_

_liquid she saw a hospital, and a curtained_

_bed like death’s palanquin. In it the dreamer_

_in a dreamless sleep._

Juri was woken at six in the morning by a drunk man lurching home, singing some awful k-pop ballad in what he clearly thought was a melodic, tuneful voice.

She did not try to go back to sleep. That had never worked for her. She was by nature someone who thrived on less, rather than more, sleep, and she never liked trying to doze off again once she had been woken up.

Lacking anything else to do, she washed the rice for breakfast, deliberately drawing the task out longer than she would have otherwise. The water had turned pearly white three times before she decided she was done, and the grains were fat and gleaming. She dumped them into her little rice cooker, added the water, and sat back.

Her apartment was small, just one big room. The kitchen was set into one wall, and there was a fold-out table next to it. Her futon was set up near the window. Luckily she was high up, so the sky flooded in. The sun, just rising now, was shedding a reddish light onto the folded mattress. There was a TV in the corner, which she never switched on, and a radio that she used as background noise when she wanted to study.

Her parents had offered to fund something much nicer and more beautiful, but Juri had refused. Partly it was a kind of ascetic rejection of the gaudy opulence of Ohtori, and partially a need to test herself, to be sure that she could do this on her own. She couldn’t have said why leaving Ohtori was so important to her, but it was.

As always, like the turning of a wheel, thoughts of Ohtori pulled her back to Shiori. Once, when Juri was in first year of university, her then girlfriend had commented on her behavior.

“You keep trying to idolize me,” she said. “It’s a really bad habit.” Reiko, always mild, always peaceful, left it at that, but Juri kept mulling over the comment. Like the rice, washed of its starch and ready to cook, she realized that she had finally let go of her resentment towards Shiori. And in the space where bitterness and pain had been, there was only a faint and peaceful regret, a wish that things could have been otherwise.

The rice cooker dinged, and Juri’s mind turned to other things. She ate breakfast, washed up, gathered her books and headed off to the university. The ginko trees were a gaudy yellow, the fan shaped leaves just beginning to flutter down.

She was climbing up the hill towards the her lecture hall when she bumped into the girl. Looking at the trees, she had failed to notice the overturned bicycle and the freshman slumped beside it.

“I’m sorry.” The words fell flat in her mouth. It was Shiori standing in front of her, as if she had appeared from the haze of Juri’s thoughts. A thousand shoujo tropes flashed through Juri’s mind, and she dismissed all of them at once. There was only silence between them, and the faint, noiseless falling of the ginko leaves.

_The water bubbled and boiled in the river_

_below, the slimy stones darkening_

_and the bottom falling to reveal a deep_

_pit. Out of it climbed the spirit, skin gleaming_

_like steel, smelling of brine and rotting fish._

_Tea, it said. Tea._

 

_Steady was the hand and patient the eye_

_of the questant, pouring tea for the kappa_

_on the banks of the Meguro. In a voice of waves_

_and grinding shells it named her quest._

_Former witch who seeks the jewel incomparable:_

_you will find what is lost_

_and bind what is found. You will name_

_the ghost who weeps, and curse the man_

_who laughs. Under lake, through the forests_

_of the mind and crowded Shibuya,_

_you will give up what you love in hope_

_to gain it again._

 

 


	2. Gyokuro

**Gyokuro**

 

_Looming over the hospital the reservoir,_

_still and murky and deep. The tiled hallways_

_slipped and whispered with drops of condensation._

_They opened up their tangled labyrinth_

_full of hypodemic thorns, and at the centre_

_the dreamer._

_Asleep, pink-haired, the scars of grief_

_and hatred on her back and arms. Her eyes open,_

_her hands moving, her mind dreaming_

_the dream of reality unclouded._

_The questant knelt before her, hand_

_on her breast, and wept._

_Name the ghost who weeps, she thought,_

_and moved with silent thread down,_

_darker and darked into the hold, until_

_before her stood a door invisible, and beyond_

_a burning fire and an old woman with knotted_

_hair. Bean sidhe, the questant said._

They got into the habit of regular meetings far more quickly than Juri was comfortable with. She had built up something of a shell for herself since leaving Ohtori. She had had girlfriends, but only two of them had ever got past her indomitable façade. And beyond that she was reserved: friendly but cool, helpful but distant. She told herself she preferred things that way.

With Shiori there were no walls. With Shiori there could be no walls.  _Childhood friends always know us more deeply than they have a right to,_  Miki said, when she rang him to ask him about it.  _I wouldn’t worry too much, Juri-senpai._  Juri sighed and changed the topic of conversation.

It wasn’t that her conversations with Shiori were particularly exciting. They talked about their coursework, about good restaurants in the area, about minor dramas in their respective social circles. They did not discuss the past. The past was another country, as one old book said, and neither Juri nor Shiori had good memories of the time they had spent there.

One Saturday afternoon, while Juri was sitting in her apartment reading a textbook on Economic Law, the phone rang. To Juri’s surprise, it was Shiori.

“Are you calling to cancel next Tuesday?” Juri said, her voice so calm and ironic that it could only be called defensive.

“Noooo. I want to know if you’ll come shopping with me!” Shiori was pitching her voice high with enthusiasm, though whether real or manufactured Juri couldn’t tell. “I have a big party to go to, and I want a second opinion on the dress.”

Juri almost said no, just on principle. But something in her pushed her forward. They could never have what they had had, her and Shiori. Whole realms were closed off to them. But they could have this.

It was a clear day in late October, and the sky was a deep and brilliant blue. In small corner shops the cans of coffee were revolving slowly in the microwaves. People bought the warmer, spicier brands of instant ramen.

Harajuku was predictably crowded. The bustle of people up and down the streets drew away the chill of the day. Juri felt warmer with every boutique they entered. By the fifth she was fanning herself with her gloves.

Shiori was a very picky shopper. She tried on every dress that caught her eye, including some truly hideous ones.

“You can’t be too picky, you know,” she said, smoothing her hands across the material that clung to her hips. “Something that looks dreadful on the rack might look really pretty when you put it on.”

Juri sighed. In fact she had been asked to say very little on this shopping trip. Shiori came out to show her every dress, but she seemed to know simply from Juri’s expression whether or not any given outfit was working.

Privately, Juri was grateful for this. She was not sure she could have kept up a stream of appropriate, critical opinions long enough without veering into uncomfortable territory. Much as she was loathe to admit it, she found herself very attracted to Shiori. They might have years of pain and anger between them, but she still found her friend appealing on a simply visceral level. Watching her change in and out of dresses did not help that problem.

Eventually, Shiori found a dress she liked, within her price range, and they headed off to dinner to an Italian restaurant Juri liked. It had a habit of serving the pasta in hollowed out loaves of bread, which Juri was pretty sure was not an authentic Italian method, but their sauces were creamy and very filling, so she was prepared to forgive them a lot.

The dinner was fine until about the halfway point. They had been talking about their classes, and the conversation had drained away into one of its natural lulls. Into that sudden murmuring silence Juri spoke.

“So, tell me about this party you’re going to.”

“Well, it’s not so much a party,” Shiori said, suddenly feeling shifty, “as it is a mixer.”

Juri felt the colour drain from her face.

“Oh. I see.”

Shiori glared at her.

“What? Have you got something to say? Why don’t you just say it? Not all of us are happy being alone, you know.”

“I wasn’t trying to criticize your choices,” Juri said. “I’m just worried about you. Mixers can be trouble. You hear stories you know, about bad thing happening to girls who go to them. I’m just trying to protect you.”

As soon as the words left her mouth she knew it had been a colossal mistake. Shiori’s eyes widened and her cheeks flushed with anger.

“You always do this! It’s not your job to worry about me. I’m not your daughter! I’m not your girlfriend! How much more superior can you be?”

Juri’s heart seemed to close. It wasn’t possible, anatomically, and yet it felt like that, a deep painful clench in her chest.

“I’m sorry,” she said nervelessly. “You’re absolutely right. Maybe you’ll even meet your prince if you go.”

Shiori stared at her, her expression locked behind a stiff face.

“You,” she said. “You don’t understand anything.” And then she walked out, leaving Juri to pay the bill and slink home alone.

_Oh it was a lovely mind. A grail of memories,_

_bound by pain. I am so lonely here. In all_

_the long years since a dying man_

_screamed me into life I was never so lucky._

_But I did not keep it. No, the laughing man_

_came, and asked his due._

_Oh questant, oh questant, beware him,_

_the laughing man. The questant bowed low_

_and made her offering. Guinness brewed_

_in Ireland, sweet and heavy with a white_

_head. Then she turned, and left the hospital._

_The dreamer slept on._

_No trees grow in the forest of the mind. No leaves_

_fall, no animals scamper and growl. Once_

_the forest was paper, remembering its origins._

_Now it hums electric in a net of light,_

_high up in the towers of Tokyo, where the boys_

_and girls sit and win dreams._

 


	3. Pu-Erh

**Pu-erh**

_Tell me where to find him, the questant said._

_The laughing man. Eyes looked at her,_

_white as the glow of the screen. But I’m winning_

_my game, it said. She pulled an old floppy disk_

_from her bag, wound about with green ivy._

_This is a copy of CIH._

_The spirit cowered before her. I’ll speak,_

_I’ll speak. The laughing man is in Shibuya._

_He lives in the house of masks. By day he dances_

_and by night he eats. He will eat you, if you go_

_to him. All the swords in the world could not save you._

_I am done with swords._

_The questant said no more. She left, and followed_

_the sway and lean of the crowd to her destination._

_Where the screens multiplied and the light_

_saturated the pedestrians she found him._

_Leaning over a girl, eyes locked on her mouth._

_He was laughing._

Like the settling of snow in winter, Juri’s world folded in on itself. She was consumed with exams, and there were so many papers to write, so many books to study and read, that she hardly noticed how little she was speaking.

Her weekly meetings with Shiori had stopped, of course. Juri resigned herself to that fact with exhausting patience. It was inevitable, she thought, that she and Shiori should not have been able to communicate. That was the great narrative of their life. They were doomed to miscommunication. Perhaps it was for the best that contact between them had ended. In spite of their last fight, her memories of Shiori were mostly sweet, and that seemed like the best she could ask for.

Towards the beginning of December, when the nights were long and dark, and the wind was cold and biting, Juri was woken out of a stupor of studying by a knock on the door. It was her friend Reika, the only person persistent enough to continue battering away at Juri’s isolation. Now she stood on the sheltered walkway outside Juri’s little apartment, a bag of beers in one hand and a net of oranges in the other.

Juri let her in, her mind slowly warming up, awakening from a daze of information. She took out the kotatsu, and lit the heater carefully, and as she slid under it she realized just how cold she had been. She buried her hands in her armpits, throwing dignity to the wind in an attempt to restore feeling to her fingers. Reika just laughed.

“You need a girlfriend,” she said. “Someone who’ll remind you eat and do your laundry.”

Juri rolled her eyes. “I manage just fine,” she said.

Reika shrugged and started peeling an orange. The smell of it bloomed in the cold room, sharp and sweet. Juri hesitated, then took one for herself. Reika nodded approvingly and pushed a beer across the table at her. It was Asahi, which Juri did not particularly like, but she took it anyway.

Reika must have sensed something in Juri’s mood, because she led the conversation gently away from girlfriends, telling stories about their mutual friends instead. Juri listened with quiet relief, content to offer the occasional snarky comment.

It was only later, when they were on their fourth beer each, and the gentle simmer of the alcohol in Juri’s stomach and head had eased the tension from her shoulders that Reika turned the conversation back to Juri.

“You’ve been very reclusive these past few months,” she said. “What happened to you?”

Juri shrugged, looking away. The reserve that made her bite her tongue was dissolved by the alcohol, but it still took a long time for her to begin speaking.

“I had a fight,” she said at last. “With an old friend of mine. We had just met up again, after a long period of separation, and I thought we were going to be able to put things right. But then I went and ruined it. I didn’t understand her.”

Reika pursed her lips.

“That doesn’t sound so bad. Certainly not like something that should keep you in your room for weeks. There must be more to it than that. Why can’t you just go apologise?”

Juri hesitated. It was very quiet in the apartment. None of her neighbours were home, and the narrow street that her window looked onto was silent. It was an absence so large she almost thought she could hear the soft noise of the falling snow.

“I’m not sure I should. Shiori and I, we have a history. We’ve been together since we were children. There’s always, always been a connection between us. At the same time, any time we’re in close proximity we’ve been completely toxic for each other. I’ve hurt her, and she’s hurt me, or at least tried to. Loving her has been like holding a barbed rose in my hand. I can feel the thorns sinking in, and I know I might be happier if I let go, but I just can’t.”

“And when it’s good, it’s really good?” Reika nodded slowly, tapping her finger against her chin. “It’s funny, I have two friends in a very similar situation. A boy and a girl, but the principle is the same. They’ve been together since they were sixteen. Every so often they break up, but they always get back together. Every single one of their friends has advised them to end it permentantly, but they can’t. I asked Shouko about it once, and she said that it was because he knew the worst of her that she couldn’t let go. He knew the worst of her, and he was still there. He’d seen her grow and change, and she couldn’t bear to let that history go, even though it was also a huge problem for their relationship.”

Juri sighed, and buried her head in her hands. She could feel the room swimming around her.

“Yes,” she said. “In the end, that’s it. I could date anyone, and try for a normal relationship, but whenever I do I realize that it won’t work, because I’m always putting on a façade. But Shiori has seen beneath the façade. She knows who I really am. Which is why I want her love so much more. I want her to love me, in spite of what she knows.”

“Or because of it.” Reika sighed, and stood up, shrugging her shoulders. “Do you mind if I stay over? It’s terribly cold out tonight.”

“No, that’s fine,” Juri said. She stood up and shook her head back and forth slowly, trying to rid herself of the blurry drunkenness hanging around her. Stumbling a little, she moved into her bedroom and set up the spare futon on the floor. She gave Reika a toothbrush belonging to one of her exes, and took a very brief shower.

Later, when they were lying in the darkness, she said the thing she most feared out loud. It slipped from her almost unnoticed, as though someone else had said it.

“What if I can’t change. What if this pattern is just who I’ll always be?”

Reika yawned, and in a voice that was full of the dissolution of sleep, said, “Well, you won’t know until you try.”

_Like a tiger, like a man. Something in him_

_snarled and predated. His breath was rotten._

_She held up a hollow stone to her eye_

_and saw him truly, his many teeth gleaming,_

_his long grin multiplying, a fractured rainbow_

_of animal instinct._

_I have come for the jewel you took, said_

_the questant. Return it to me. The laughing_

_man looked at her. What a fool._

_Once you might have challenged me._

_But then you gave up all your power._

_You can do nothing._

_Your mistake, answered the questant,_

_is in thinking that I became less, and not more._

_Just because I gave up power, doesn’t mean_

_I gave up strength. So the challenge was made._

_Songs will be written of that battle,_

_epics sung in memory._

 


	4. Ceylon

**Ceylon**

_Through the streets they moved, seen_

_by no-one, felt by all. He as a choking malevolence_

_and she as a breath of fresh air._

_She drew on everything. Every memory_

_of power and beauty and strength. In the_

_end he became her brother._

_That was when she knew she had won._

_You forget, she said, that I have already_

_defeated this enemy. Long was the spell she_

_wove around him, to bind him in place_

_for a hundred hundred years, until every tree_

_that grew there was dead._

_Last she bound him with his name._

_Manrichoras. Then she took the jewel,_

_and went back to the hospital, and the dreamer._

_Memory is a shining thing, she thought._

_She set it in the hands of her beloved._

_Now you know._

It took two and a half weeks for Juri to gather the strength to go to Shiori’s apartment. It wasn’t just nerves, though they played a big part. She wanted to be sure. If she was going to try to love Shiori, she had to think very carefully about what that meant.

She might have hesitated forever, waiting for the perfect moment, but Christmas was around the corner, and Juri had the distinct feeling that if she missed Christmas there would be no other opportunity. So, on the evening of the 19th of December, she bought an expensive bunch of Gardenia and walked the three kilometers to the building where Shiori lived. She had been there only once before, and it took her about ten minutes to find it.

The building was a high-rise, and Shiori lived on the seventeenth floor. Juri waited in the elevator nervously, clutching the bunch of flowers to keep her hands from trembling. The air was cold and frosty, and her breath plumed out of her. She knocked on Shiori’s door with a trembling hand, half praying her friend was out.

Shiori opened the door in sweatpants and an old, ratty jumper. Her face went absolutely white when she saw Juri.

“What do you want?” she said, bristling and hostile.

“I keep hurting you,” Juri said. She hadn’t intended to say it so bluntly. She had wanted time to ease into it. But the look on Shiori’s face was one of raw pain, and the words tumbled out of her one after the other. “I sometimes think that all I’ve ever done is hurt you.”

“I have no right to expect any better,” Shiori said after a long moment. “I’m always at my worst around you. You bring out all my insecurities. You make me into such an ugly person. And then I hurt you for it.”

“It’s a vicious cycle,” Juri said, half smiling from the pain of speaking it out loud.

A gust of wind blew savagely around them, and Shiori opened the door fully.

“Come on in,” she said.

Shiori’s apartment was small, but it was full of decorations. Cheap reproductions of famous paintings were cluttered on the walls, and there were different printed fabrics draped on every surface. It was as unlike Juri’s austere apartment as a place could be.

Juri filled a jug with water and set the Gardenias in it while Shiori made the tea. They tucked themselves carefully into Shiori’s kotatsu and supped at the drink quietly.

“I almost decided it would be better if I didn’t see you again,” Juri said at last. “I thought that maybe this was just too difficult to make work.”

“I don’t blame you for thinking that,” Shiori said, stirring her tea carefully. “What made you change your mind?”

“I like spending time with you,” Juri said. “I enjoy your company. I’ve dated women who loved and admired me, women who thought I was amazing, women who were good at communicating, but I never had as much fun with any of them as I did with you.”

Shiori sighed and rubbed her nose with her fingers.

“I kept dating pale imitations of you,” she said. “Or people who were very deliberately not like you at all. Eventually I had to acknowledge what I was really doing.”

They looked down at their cups.

“If we’re going to do this,” Juri said, “you have to tell me what you’re really feeling. No mind games. I can try and do what you want, but only if you make that clear.”

“Ok,” Shiori said. “And you have to try and treat me like an equal. Don’t protect me. Don’t lie to me. Don’t shelter me. You have to let me be my own person.”

“Ok.”

Juri put a hand to her cheek, and found to her surprise that she was crying. Like the moment when pain disappears, and the relief is so great that it moves you to tears, she was moved by some great uncoiling of emotion in her heart.

There was a movement to her left, and she looked to see Shiori scooting round the kotatsu. Shiori’s hand crept slowly into hers, and Shiori’s head came to rest gently on her shoulder.

“I,” Shiori’s voice was shaking, “I love you.”

“I love you too.”

The tears swelled to a flood, and suddenly they were pouring down her cheeks, hot and heavy and accompanied by great shuddering sobs, and her chest was heaving with their passage, making her body shake even as she leant down to kiss Shiori. Their teeth knocked together, their lips slipped dryly against one another, their hands burned, holding tight as though each one was the other’s life raft.

 

*

 

They went to a Korean restaurant for Valentine’s day. Shiori had made the reservation, knowing that Juri was not fond of sweets. It was a very cautious, very conscious gift, and there was so much anxiety in Shiori’s voice when she told Juri about it that Juri wanted to hold her close and reassure her that it was perfect. But Shiori did not work like that. She mistrusted reassurance, she disliked comfort. So Juri merely said thank you, and made sure she was wearing Shiori’s favorite dress for the dinner.

She went the traditional route herself and gave chocolate. Shiori seemed delighted with the gift anyway.

They had a lovely, cheerful meal, cooking the meat and eating it wrapped in lettuce with various condiments. Shiori was a fiend for kimchi, eating it raw and cooking it on the pan, gulping it down like rice.

The last two months had not been perfectly smooth. There were fights, and they were both very good at pushing each other’s buttons, at knowing exactly where to drive the needle home. But it had been better. They were happier, Juri suspected, than either of them had been in a long time.

It was raining when they left the restaurant, and they shared a taxi back to Juri’s apartment. They ducked inside, shaking out the umbrella and stripping off their wet coats and shoes. Juri pulled the door shut after her and found Shiori standing in her slippers on the floor, using the step up to equalize their height difference. She leant forward and grabbed the edges of Juri’s jacket, pulling her into a long, shivering kiss. Juri closed her eyes, a tangled and beautiful love sluicing through her veins, and slid her arms around Shiori’s shoulders. They stayed like that for a long time.

_Anthy! The voice cracked like ice, like a glacier_

_breaking into the sea. So now you remember._

_Yes. A long silence lay between them_

_the gulf between innocence and experience._

_This is your choice. I will leave, if_

_you ask me to._

_The dreamer, who had again her own name_

_Utena, hesitated. For the last year and a half_

_she had been in the shadows of reality,_

_in a world where she had never been betrayed_

_where the million swords of human hatred_

_had never pierced her._

_It was not a simple thing. But the answer, like_

_Amaranth, had never faded from her heart._

_You know I was only ever happy when I was_

_with you. She took Anthy’s hands in hers,_

_and they ended as all happy quests end_

_with a kiss and a promise._

**Author's Note:**

> So I signed up to write Utena, got it as my assignment, and then floudered. I hadn't thought about it at all, but when it came to writing a story I had no idea where to go. I couldn't do normal Utena/Anthy, because I felt I'd already written that story, more or less to my own satisfaction. I couldn't do an epic prose narrative, because Archimage exists, and I knew I wasn't going to be able to outdo it. I turned to Shiori and Juri, but without the anchor point of Utena/Anthy I wasn't sure how to approach them. This combination of poetry and prose was my way of resolving that knot, and I felt it sufficiently original to be worth penning. It's pretty experimental, even for me. I know a lot of people, myself included, are very wary of fandom poetry, and with good reason. I've done my best to balance imagery and narrative in the poem here, but I have no idea how far I succeeded. It was a really, really interesting thing to write, though and I really enjoyed working on it.


End file.
